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Saturday, December 17, 2016

TRYING TO MAKE SENSE OUT OF BELIEVING IN GOD

God awaits our decisions. Every person has to ponder the same question. Does God exist? Some say yes. Others say the opposite. How are we to gauge, determine, with any sort of factual accuracy? Is His reality still up for grabs? Human conclusions are clearly divided.

So I wish to come alongside the seeker who has yet to reach his or her conclusion. Maybe my words will assist; and, then again, maybe you will deem them useless. Nonetheless, I very much wish to contribute to the believing factors toward God.

It is a grave mistake to try to make sense out of believing in God. Once one should reach such a state, God will have necessarily been reduced to human guestimation. The reason this isn't good is because, from this angle, in order to understand God we would necessarily need to reduce Him to humanistic, scientific, explanational concepts. This would make us god to Him; not Him to us.

Faith...yes, note the word...faith is faith because it isn't sight. It isn't catagorizable. It is neither chartable, tangible, nor manageable. Faith is a daring and true beyondness of human intelligence that pulls one into the territory of determining that God is, indeed, actual.

Believing God doesn't make sense to the calculatory-driven mind. It thrives, rather, on conviction from the heart. Ephesians 3:19 has an interesting choice of words....and to know the love of Christ with surpasses knowledge.... Pause a moment. We are to KNOW something beyond KNOWING? Really?

The first know in the original language is epi-know (as in epi-dermis/upper dermis). Epi-knowing is upper knowledge/beyond knowledge compared to the regular knowledge one possesses. Thus the Bible states that we are to KNOW the love of Christ WHICH SURPASSES routine, explanational knowledge. This, of course, is stated in the context of the Holy Spirit working in our lives.

This is where faith takes a welcomed and gigantic leap. Faith is the assurance of things hoped for; the conviction of things not seen (Hebrews 11:1). The reason faith is insane to the unbeliever is because of his efforts is to make sense out of the Bible. It doesn't, won't, and isn't supposed to make sense to the human mind. Conversion isn't that we move from non-church attendance to church attendance. Conversion is leaping into a totally foreign territory of life's unfolding beyond our wildest imagination as well as our most robust fact-gathering tour.

We are called into a tremendously absurd zone called belief. But, even Christians struggle so with this concept as we do our best to build churches from our KNOWLEDGE rather than from the EPI-KNOWLEDGE that God affords all who dare...to...believe. When one shifts from knowing to the epi-knowing daily walk the following changes:

We become strong givers of our funds. Plain knowledge goes through the motions with guarded and self-justifying, but hesitational, giving.

We become merciful. Normal knowledge still permits a believer to be huffy and hold eternal grudges against others; offense rules and reconciliation cannot happen without mercy.

We sense what others, who appear to be struggling, can become. Regular knowledge has not the eyes to see futuristically as to the transformation that can take place for all.

We hope. In hope against hope...we believe that what isn't can become...Romans 4:17-25.

It could be that some would sense immediate relief from the drain of life is we could just give our God permission to do His thing without our needing to KNOW. What would really help each of us is to leap into His EPI-KNOWING. Maybe there is something to the idea of letting go and letting God. What if that isn't just a phrase....but the path to experiential life?

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Terry Rush

My World

We all get lost in our workaholism, people pleasing, and numbing behaviors as we try to escape the pain of life and the messiness of loving others. But some of us appear more whole than others, and that may be the greatest danger of all. It results in the last addiction: we rely on ourselves to heal ourselves, and so we miss the healing path.

Sharon Hersh...The Last Addiction

I miss being in the company of risky and complex thinkers, people who are invested in our culture and who challenge me to think to the edges of my comfort zones. I believed then and I believe now that where everybody thinks the same nobody thinks very much.Rosaria Butterfield...The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert